The KDE Team today announced its collaboration with industry leaders to
form the KDE League. The League will focus on facilitating the promotion,
distribution and development of KDE, with the goal of establishing KDE
as a desktop standard for PCs, workstations and mobile devices. The
League will not be involved in KDE development.
The League will be holding a press conference at 2:00 pm Las Vegas (PST)
time on Wednesday, November 15, 2000, in Room B in the media tent in the
silver lot of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). This is great news for KDE -- finally the marketing support that will help people learn about the technical excellence of KDE, without any changes in the KDE development model! The full press
release follows.

DATELINE NOVEMBER 15, 2000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Open Source Developers and Industry Leaders Unify
to Create the KDE League

League Will Promote KDE as a Desktop Standard

November 15, 2000 (Las Vegas, Nevada). Developers of theK Desktop Environment (KDE), the easy
to use, Open Source desktop environment, today announced the formation
of the KDE League, a group of industry
leaders and KDE developers focused on facilitating the promotion,
distribution and development of KDE.

The League will focus on promoting the use of the advanced Open Source
desktop alternative on PCs, workstations and handheld devices by
enterprises and individuals and on promoting the development of KDE
software by third-party developers. The League will not be directly
involved in developing the core KDE libraries and applications,
although League members are encouraged to contribute to the KDE
codebase in the spirit of KDE's wildly successful 'Bazaar-style'
development.

Instead, the industry leaders have united to provide financial, moral
and promotional support to KDE with three principal goals in mind.
First, to ensure that KDE remains a desktop standard for Linux and other
UNIX workstations and PCs and that KDE becomes a desktop standard on
handheld devices. Second, to help KDE compete effectively, on its
merits, with proprietary and other desktops prevalent today. Third,
to encourage third-party developers to develop for the KDE platform,
thereby providing KDE users with a wide assortment of software that
makes use of KDE's cutting-edge technologies.

"The creation of the KDE League marks a vital step forward for KDE,"
said Matthias Ettrich, founder of KDE. "With the support of our
corporate partners, we can work together to ensure KDE gains wider
recognition, a greater number of applications and increased
functionality, while maintaining the open development model and
technical excellence that has made KDE the most popular Open Source
desktop."

Governance of the League will be controlled by a Board composed of
representatives of the core KDE developers and of each KDE League
member, with the developers and corporate sponsors sharing power
equally.

In conjunction with the announcement of the KDE League, IBM announced
that it is working with key Linux development partners such as
Trolltech, Mandrake and other League members to deliver components
of IBM's ViaVoice
on KDE. IBM's ViaVoice is
currently the only voice recognition software commercially
available for the Linux operating environment.

About KDE

KDE is an independent, collaborative project by thousands of developers
worldwide. The KDE team recently released KDE 2.0, which for the
first time offers a fully object-oriented, component-based desktop and
office suite. KDE 2 promises to make the Linux desktop as easy to use as
the popular commercial desktops while staying true to open standards and
empowering developers and users with quality Open Source software.

For more information about KDE, please visit KDE'sweb site. For more information about the KDE League, please visit the KDE League's web site.

Comments

What, might I hurt their feelings? Quite frankly I don't give a fig for them. I used to buy RH until 5.2 and then the whole hypocracy sickened me. They didn't have any problem shipping closed source apps like bru, xing (some xserver) but qt was a real problem to them. Bullshit - they saw that they needed control of a very important part of the UI and with KDE - they were in the same boat as the rest of the distros. So GNOME was pushed and the KDE fud was spread.

There's a huge difference between not backing up a free software effort and actively working against a free software effort. I'm not talking about supporting a competitive effort, I'm talking about approaching commercial or free software developers and feeding them with missinformation. They failed in many cases, though, where the engineers won the battle and decided to go with the technically more appealing solution. Corel is a prime example for this.

I'm not bitter at all. If Red Hat said clearly "we don't see how we can make money with Qt, but we see a great business opportunity to push and lead Gtk development", all would have been fine. Open cards, you know. I wish they wouldn't have advertised their powertools product with a huge screenshot of my LyX software at this time - it had exactly the same "licensing problems" in their point of view.

Seriously, I'm much more dissappointed that they hired some excellent developers from the KDE team and don't give those enough time to work on their respective KDE projects.

It is actually a major problem for some of us. I am chairman of the Math. Department in Binghamton. We are running around 30 desktops with Redhat and Kde, mostly Dell machines. I chose Redhat because it is dominant around here, and Kde because it is stable. We recently installed the Redhat rpms for Kde2 on Redhat7. These rpms do not contain any documentation files. They contain the uncompiled index.docbook files, so practically no help function is working.
(Only the programs that have not been updated to docbook format). They contain the translations for languages starting from a to h. Apparently they crashed on Hebrew. Redhat 7 broke wordperfect 8 which is absolutely essential to us until kword is a little more finished. We found out solving the problem by installing a couple of libraries from Redhat 6.2. I told Redhat they ought to post that on their website and got an incredibly snooty answer back, saying that Wordperfect was Corels responsibility not theirs. Having the upgrade break the programs of the competition is something I seem to have heard of before :). The fact that we get a snooty answer to telling them about the solution to a problem, I find a bit too much. They decided to stop Solaris support without any warning, which means we have about 8 machines we cannot keep uptodate. They are pretty old, so we can live with that, but the fact that they have not produced decent Kde2 rpms is very irritating. I realize we only send about $300 pr year to Redhat (and less in the future because Solaris is not supported), so we can not demand too much, but at least I can confirm that they have a strange attitude to kde. I really long for the days when the Redhat rpms for kde were made by the kde developers.

As for breaking WordPerfect, it's offtopic here, but it was actually announced in the release notes that we're discontinuing support for libc 5.x packages. libc 5.x has been obsolete for about 3 years now, definitely enough time for anyone to update his applications.
Sorry about the snooty answers you got - some people around here tend to get aggressive when they're getting a couple of "bug reports" reporting an announced "feature". The tone may not have been right, but the content probably was.
(May I ask where you sent the message?)

The Qt 1.x license (not 2.x, not QPL) was actually a bit of a problem, because it didn't allow the code to be modified.

I personally think that gtk's API is a pain, and therefore it wasn't the right way to go, but the idea of a really free desktop was right. If I had been in control, I would have pushed a really free Qt workalike to run KDE with.
I guess some people's dislike for C++ was the primary reason they decided to do something completely different.

As for RH joining the League, I'm trying to convince those in control to do just that, but I have no idea whether or not I'll have any success.
If you have any good arguments I should pass along, feel free to let me know. ;)

Nope, they didn't include it in RH 5.2. That in fact was the reason Mandrake started. It was originally RH + KDE. With KDE being the #1 desktop, and the competitive pressure of Mandrake becoming popular, RH included KDE in 6.0. On 5.2 you DLed KDE from kde.org and installed it yourself like everybody else. We sometimes forget how much we had to piece together in RH5.2 to get a usable desktop, with everything being included in nice distros like Mandrake these days.

/*
The GNOME project has built a complete free and easy-to-use desktop environment for the user, as well as a powerful
application framework for the software developer. GNOME is part of the GNU project, and is free software (some times
referred to as open source software.)

The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goals of the GNOME project.

To achieve these goals, the Foundation will coordinate releases of GNOME and determine which projects are part of
GNOME. The Foundation will act as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with
the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation may
produce educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about GNOME software. In addition, it may
sponsor GNOME-related technical conferences, represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by others, help
create technical standards for the project and promote the use and development of GNOME software.
*/

The only real difference I see is that, yes, the GNOME Foundation will determine which projects are "part of" GNOME, but frankly you can still build apps on the core libraries without being recognized by the GNOME foundation.

/*
The GNOME project has built a complete free and easy-to-use desktop environment for the user, as well as a powerful
application framework for the software developer. GNOME is part of the GNU project, and is free software (some times
referred to as open source software.)

The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goals of the GNOME project.

To achieve these goals, the Foundation will coordinate releases of GNOME and determine which projects are part of
GNOME. The Foundation will act as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with
the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation may
produce educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about GNOME software. In addition, it may
sponsor GNOME-related technical conferences, represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by others, help
create technical standards for the project and promote the use and development of GNOME software.
*/

The only real difference I see is that, yes, the GNOME Foundation will determine which projects are "part of" GNOME, but frankly you can still build apps on the core libraries without being recognized by the GNOME foundation.

The real, practical difference is that only contributing individuals (hackers, documentors, artists, translators, etc) can be members of the GNOME Foundation, whereas only companies can be members of the KDE League. Compare the membership list on the KDE League site to the membership list on the GNOME Foundation site.

Does the Kde League need anyone to answer the telephone, stuff envelopes or maintain its web site? If so, please sent one of your employment forms to the above email address. You are an equal opportunity employer, I hope.

Final comment. Before anyone asks, I've already tried the Gnome Foundation. Beggars can't be choosers. But they say I don't meet their height requirement. 6'- 2" here. They are looking for 3'- 6" maximum.

This is indeed a good sign for the user community as a whole, since, many of the user interface issues haven't been given much priority, like you couldn't use KDE (and all its applications) with using the mouse as in Windows. And some people thought that KDE won't live longer due to GNOME Foundation. This is a very intelligent step... Thanks a lot.

Why isn't membership of the KDE League open to hackers? Is it wise to give all the power over PR and marketing to a bunch of companies who probably have vested interests in pushing their own proprietary alternatives too Free Software?

The GNOME Foundation model where membership is only open to actual contributors to the project would probably have been more constructive.

Please note that according to Section 3.1(c) of the bylaws the developers have a number of Board seats, most of which are currently vacant, and hold half the voting power of the League. To get a "hacker" seat talk to the KDE developers, they can appoint whomever they want.

And thus a prestige and pissing match spurred on by industry interest begins another deep schism in the Unix desktop market.

As I recall, a few months ago, the DEVELOPERS involved were talking about getting the two component systems (Bonobo and KParts) to interoperate, and get a unified basis for software out there. Whoops, sorry, we've got to look the cleverest and best, so whatever guys, nice thoughts, we're doing our own thing.

Both "Foundations" are at fault on this. CORBA, the long forgotten standard, now has a Component Model that is an open standard, and with just a bit of support, could get the Unix desktops onto a more equal footing with the Windows platform for development capabilities, but apparently the two great environments we've got aren't particulary interested in the *most effective* solution. Just a perceived *best* solution. Based I believe largely on complexity and academic merit.

It's odd isn't it? Commercial software works to make the product that will make the most money with the minimum effort, and that will lock you in over long term. Free software looks to make the best possible software with today's technology, and make it free and open to seize the high ground morally, which subserving other ideas and opinions of what is "good" to their own egos. I think we need a middle ground, where the "best of breed" comes back. Take the best, most effective parts from all of them and find a way to roll them together. Adopt, embrace, champion.

Don't get me wrong, there are people and projects in the Free and Open Source camps who believe in this type of creedo. I'm just not seeing it from the two most critical and successful products out there, being KDE and Gnome. That's too bad because so much rides on the fortunes of those projects.

I've used, and still use, both. I still believe that KDE has a great interface, and some excellent apps facilitated by a much clearer, easier to learn library and object set. But I still believe the Gnome infrastructure would allow absolutely fantastic things and integration with exisiting legacy and new systems on unparalleled scales. It suffers from a kitchen sink syndrome from what I can see, and it's harder for most developers to learn because of it.

Disclaimer: I haven't coded solutions in either, so I'm speaking based on the good and bad things I have experienced and had related to me from other developers and on more than a few news groups and chat systems. I raise the point invectively to see if anyone gives a crap about making an effective replacement on the desktop or not!

Tell me I'm wrong, tell me I'm right, add to or detract, but at least use your mind and think about it first.

I really don't know, why people always see development of KDE and GNOME as a pissing match. Certainly there are users, who take their personal preference too far and insult the other side and sometimes they are actually desktop developers. Not nice, but something I can understand, since we are human.

However, I really don't think that has anything to do with it. People are people and given enough large crowd, you'll certainly get very different opinions. And that's what we have.

I agree with you, that it would be nice if we could join forces and develop one desktop, but even though I do like some stuff that GNOME developers created, I generally dislike their development kit, don't agree with direction and way how they develop it. I'm quite certain at least some of them feel the same, so why should we all be forced to do work on something that we don't believe in?

I don't see anything really significant that KDE could benefit from GNOME and judging by views of GNOME developers I met at OLS this year, many feel the opposite. This, too, is just fine.

Different visions and personalities are also a reason, why there are so many different programs that basically do the same thing. I'm not bothered by that, I only wish people would reuse code more and that interoperability of desktops would be a bit better.

I see GNOME foundation and KDE league as two organizations that can be quite helpful for all of us as long as they'll keep attacking each other and even though it's early to tell, I do believe they won't do that.

It's interesting to see differences between them that reflect the difference in developer's attitude. KDE leaves development to developers and PR to PR people (and I agree with this approach), where GNOME leaves basically all control with hackers. I don't believe they (in general) make good PR people, so I'm glad KDE didn't choose the same way of organizing things, but I certainly don't see a reason why GNOME shouldn't have it like they do.

The pissing match is, as always, spurred on by the advocates, and not usually the core developers. That's the typical computer jihad effect. :-)

I fully appreciate the statement you make in differences of opinions, methods, approaches and toolkits. As far as environment, that diversity can help and strengthen the community and the Linux/Unix/wherever it evolves to desktop as a whole.

The thing I'm more driving at is under the hood. Borland, Symantec, Microsoft and dozens of others all write interoperable apps on the Windows platform, all using very, very different approaches in the development tools. But a use never notices that difference. A user can't usually tell if the MFC is trolling under the button, or if it's the VCL from Borlan/Inprise.

That's the important part. Have the drag-and-drop interoperate between KDE and Gnome apps. Have the clipboard play nice. And have the window managers behave and interface somewhat reasonably and consistently with all the apps. I'm advocating the user's experience in this, not the developer's methods.

I'm a software developer myself, professionally for 10 years, and over time I've realized that the user is still why most people write software. So someone can say, "this is great, thanks!" to our efforts, or maybe even pay us! :-)

So if we're having a disagreement in methods or approach or opinion, fine. But don't air the dirty laundry! :-)

Is there a solution to the under-the-hood level? Or shall we just settle on a complete platform VHS/BETA war and have it out?

Well, window managers have a new standard adopted by GNOME and KDE (and possibly in other window managers as well). If window managers supports it, it should work well in KDE and GNOME. Kwin does and I'm sure there are others as well.

Drag and drop should work. There might be bugs, but both use same protocol as far as I know.

I'm not to sure about clipboard though, but at least text copying usually works alright.

I'm thinking a lot about component technologies lately. I plan (if nothing comes in between, which regretfully often does) to look for some way of interoperability between Bonobo and Kparts/DCOP in the comming months, even though I'm a bit pesimist about it. If not for anything else, I'm not as good developer as I would like to be. But it seems to me that I won't get much rest before I at least take a shot at it.

So, basic things definitely work, more complex sadly don't. I don't know of anyone, who would be working on them, but I wouldn't be surprised of their existance.

Ah. I knew about the fledgling window manager standard, but I didn't know that both "sides" had a compliant manager. Great!

D&D support, OK, I'll take your word on it... :-)

Actually, it's more the middle/right mouse click copy/paste I usually miss. More sophisticated clipboard use probably tromps on your main point, which is the Bonobo/KParts thing. I recall that the leads on both these projects were actually talking at one point. Did anything ever come of that? My guess from very limited knowledge was that if Bonobo evolved towards the Corba 3 CMM model and KParts with what I consider a clean API at a wrapper around it to mimic that behaviour, then you would have deep interoperability, at least in principle. I know that the CMM standard and all the bits it relates too are by no means trivial, but the biggest step is agreeing on the API. CORBA, although admittedly Gnome biased due to rooting, is an open standard that could be non-partisan for support baselines couldn't it?

Just out of curiosity, what is the root of your pessimism on the integration effort?

AFAIK the only thing that came out of talks was that merge won't happen (yet).

The reason for my pessimism is time and interest. Both projects now have more or less finished component technology (I believe Bonobo is not finished yet, but it's not missing much either) and there are more and more applications that use them. That in itself is great, but it makes change so much more difficult. And with time it will take it even more so, because there will (hopefully) be a huge amount of applications using them.

Both sides, especially developers really familiar with these technologies, really like their approach and are not willing to drop it. Since none of projects is a clear winner, neither side feels the pressing need to work on it. The pressing need feel those developers, that would like to develop "native" applications for both desktops. Development of a bridge of some sort will therefore have to come from them.

And, afterall, why would they do it? Sure, they don't oppose the idea openly, but do they really like it? For example, if there was a bridge that would allow KDE programs use Bonobo components, would it benefit KDE or GNOME? My guess, remembering OS/2, would be it would benefit GNOME.

So, here you have probably a massive project, where people most qualified to do it don't have time and interest for it. As I've said, I plan to look into it, but knowing me I wouldn't expect much ;)

Btw, CORBA is open, but AFAIK GNOME developers added some extensions to it. However, I have no idea if that changes anything.

Gnome did extend the base model I believe. And it wasn't based on CORBA 3 and the Component Model (CMM) it includes to sort of substitute for COM on the desktop. I wonder....

I don't know if many agree with me, but with a lot of the network apps coming about (distribute network, such as a gnapster/Jabber thing) there is a growth towards systems that may be benefitted by richer integration at an object level. I figure it will go one of two ways. Either the CORBA/COM+ extending will continue, or SOAP is going to come on really strong, depending on how the standard seeps out, given the support from both the MS camp and the Apache project right at the outset. Maybe we could get both camps to talk SOAP, as that doesn't favour anyone in particular, and helps everyone including MS users in integrating the UNIX systems.

Anybody know if there's been work on SOAP integration into either desktop framework?

I really don't know, why people always see development of KDE and GNOME as a pissing match. Certainly there are users, who take their personal preference too far and insult the other side and sometimes they are actually desktop developers. Not nice, but something I can understand, since we are human.

However, I really don't think that has anything to do with it. People are people and given enough large crowd, you'll certainly get very different opinions. And that's what we have.

I agree with you, that it would be nice if we could join forces and develop one desktop, but even though I do like some stuff that GNOME developers created, I generally dislike their development kit, don't agree with direction and way how they develop it. I'm quite certain at least some of them feel the same, so why should we all be forced to do work on something that we don't believe in?

I don't see anything really significant that KDE could benefit from GNOME and judging by views of GNOME developers I met at OLS this year, many feel the opposite. This, too, is just fine.

Different visions and personalities are also a reason, why there are so many different programs that basically do the same thing. I'm not bothered by that, I only wish people would reuse code more and that interoperability of desktops would be a bit better.

I see GNOME foundation and KDE league as two organizations that can be quite helpful for all of us as long as they'll keep attacking each other and even though it's early to tell, I do believe they won't do that.

It's interesting to see differences between them that reflect the difference in developer's attitude. KDE leaves development to developers and PR to PR people (and I agree with this approach), where GNOME leaves basically all control with hackers. I don't believe they (in general) make good PR people, so I'm glad KDE didn't choose the same way of organizing things, but I certainly don't see a reason why GNOME shouldn't have it like they do.

In principle I can see nothing wrong with the KDE league... if they will be (besides promotion), for example, updating KDE websites, writing documentation and similar stuff that developers can't find time to do it. Wouldn't it be nice to have the best desktop, with great bunch of applications and a complete documentation??

Facts: Both the GNOME Advisory Board (not the Foundation), and the KDE League are composed of companies with an interest in guiding development. These companies will influence development to some extent, despite statements otherwise (else what's the point of joining?).

This is a necessary evil. We need the support of companies to achieve broader acceptance. Even within the existing Linux community. People who say "we're just in this to develop cool software, we don't care about acceptance" fail to "get it." Part of cool software is having standards and seamless interoperability that only come from having a solid user and developer base. If every major distro is released with GNOME as the default, and every major corporation with an interest in open source is developing GNOME software, and GNOME manages to stay within even 6 months of KDE (in terms of maturity), then the simple fact is everyone will be using GNOME. And KDE won't be cool anymore because it won't be able to attract the number of developers and applications which make it cool now.

Personally, I'm glad KDE got a group to fight for it on the corporate field. I like both it and GNOME, believe it or not, and don't want to see KDE go under prematurely just because it lacked industry support. May the best desktop win!

Promotional work doesn't come easy to full-time nerds, and I'm allways ready for a challange.

The thing is, that in places like these (Iceland), there are about 20 people that realy do the work on the KDE translations, and maybe two of them help out with development (someone submitted a fix to a memory leak in KFM a while back).
The people in the translation team have been working together to promote KDE, by sending letters to the government and dancing around in the media. I for one think that the whole idea of promoting KDE should be done in the following manner (because I belive there are others like us):

Each translation team chooses a promotioal manager. Then a special group of people sit around a large table and decide on promotional strategys, and they then e-mail the strategies to some maling list. Then it is up to the Promotional managers of each team to get everybody to do something...